Zettelkasten and shallow thoughts

I was recently listening to a podcast by Cal Newport, and a section on “intellectual shallowness” caught my ear. He mentions Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) and Marshall McLuhan (Playboy interview) to make the point that exceptionally shallow media like tweets, leads us to fit our ideas/arguments/whatever inside a microscopic format, where all nuance and ability to discuss it, is lost. And that this leads to ever-more shallow thinking. He posits that the only way to improve not only the depth of our discourse, but the depth of our thoughts, is to only consume and work in long-form media. In the podcast, he goes into some detail about the negative effects of the former and how to achieve the latter.

I can certainly buy those claims (which is one reason why I’m trying so hard to break my habit of consuming intellectual “junk food”). However, a more interesting thought also came to mind when I was listening to this: if deep thoughts require long-form input, does this mean that the Zettelkasten (or other short-form note) method(s) is actually antithetical to producing new deep knowledge?

Since I first stumbled upon the description of the method, I’ve had thoughts similar to these–that taking short snippets of knowledge sound limiting in a way. However, Cal’s related insight gives me more pause. I’ll have to think about this more, but I wanted to get the idea down.